Ideas - Deliberation in a Time of Anger: Making Space for Collective Decision-Making

Episode Date: September 26, 2024

At a time of ever-growing polarization, where people are less and less likely to cross paths with those who don’t agree with them, what does it take to deliberate? IDEAS producer Naheed Mustafa explores whether there’s space for collective decision-making in an era marked by anger and disagreement.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Some issues routinely end up in an impasse.

Immigration, abortion, education, housing. Gaza encampments on university campuses is another one. In April of 2024, students at Columbia University set up some four dozen tents on campus and called it the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. Students have been threatened with suspension and discipline action but are still refusing to leave until their demands are met. It was the first of many that popped up across the United States, Canada, Australia and several European countries.

The reactions to these encampments ranged from unequivocal support to absolute outrage. This is how UCLA's student newspaper, The Daily Bruin, described the violence instigated by counter-protesters in an editorial. Quote, it began with ear-piercing screams of wailing babies loudly emitting from speakers, counter-protesters tearing down the barricades, laser pointers flashing into the encampment. Protesters were asking their universities to boycott and divest from Israel, or at least to start thinking about it. Many universities said the encampments were against campus policy

and made other students feel unsafe. And that impasse left little space for deliberation, where students and administrators could meet, discuss, and overcome the stalemate together. And we urge the administration of this university to reverse course immediately. We say to our administration, if you decide to move against the students, you'll have to go through us first. As with other contentious issues, populist rhetoric also fueled the fire. But I just wondered, is there anybody in the panel who thinks that we should not deport students who are here unlawfully, who are engaging in this activity?

It feels very, very dangerous. So imagine having a disagreement with somebody who seems to be ready to take any of your weakness and exploit it to destroy you. Then you're going to be less inclined to give any ground at all to acknowledge the merits of the other person's position. any ground at all to acknowledge the merits of the other person's position. Of course, in a democracy, we still have to decide things together. But how? Ideas producer Nahid Mustafa explores the space for collective decision-making in an era marked by distrust and polarization. She begins at the Gaza encampment at the University of Toronto, which was established in May 2024. All day, every day. At this point, it's already out there. So why don't you start off? Yeah,

I'm Erin Mackey. I'm a fourth year undergraduate student at the University of Toronto studying political science and environmental studies, and I'm graduating in June which is very exciting. I am one of the organizers with U of T Occupy for Palestine and I'm also one of the media representatives and we are sitting here taking this interview at King's College Circle which is in the heart of campus at the University of Toronto. We yesterday at 4 a.., about 150 students swarmed the field and set up tents. We set up about 55 tents and renamed the circle, the People's Circle for Palestine. So for me, I have been involved in other organizing spaces on campus. I'm one of the co-founders of this group called Climate Justice U of T. And so we, you know, there's a lot of intersections between climate justice and Palestinian liberation. And so when everything was happening in October,

there was the Toronto Students for Palestine group emerged, and I had some friends who were involved and had helped support at rallies and things like that. We obtained a meeting with U of T President Merrick Gertler, and that meeting did not go very well. Unfortunately, we had gone into it with high hopes, but they basically he refused to engage in any sort of conversation or dialogue and commit to any additional meetings or conversations. And so after that, we had talked about escalating and doing some additional action, like some sort of encampment or something along those lines. And then everything started happening in Columbia. And that was really really kind of like the okay we need to get our act together like let's really go like this is you know after columbia we saw you know 10 more encampments pop up then 20 and now last i checked i think it's like 120 or something which is wild

um and then it you know they started happening in canada as well um and so we yeah we've been planning this for about two two and a half weeks which is not a long time I know the folks uh weren't on the streets that the folks at Columbia took like two months to plan their encampment um but we definitely you know it takes a lot of time and energy and it's been a bit of a whirlwind because we've been you know folks have been doing this on top of finals um and you know final exams and all of that and so it's definitely been a lot but yesterday finally setting up and establishing this encampment was really monumental and exciting and I'm cautiously optimistic as they say.

Yeah so my family's actually from Gaza. Am I getting a little... sorry we've lost quite a bit of people so i just pull myself together but so we have lost like um some family we've been like pretty displaced we've lost a lot of like homes that have been within my family for like a long long time now for like decades upon decades like great like with like houses my grandma has lived in since she was a baby um and that's like you know it's very stressful for us so it is like a duty for me and it's an obligation for me to be able to stand up here for my family, for my people, and for my homeland. Yeah, I just need to like pull myself together for a second. Thank you.

Sorry, it's just when you said this was going to be personal, I knew it was going to like, I can do it. It's just like I needed like, sorry, thank you. needed like sorry thank you okay do you want to get a drink of water no no I'm fine okay I'm good okay yeah so I have a lot of personal connection and it's been like very frustrating to have to come to this institution and like deal with this institution and like deal with like being on campus on top of like stressing with is my family getting out safely where are they going what house has been destroyed who has been killed and you know like I like I have I've been in situations and where I'm finding out that members have been killed like before I'm going in to take midterms. And I haven't had any support, really. My name is Alejandro Paz.

I'm an Associate Professor of Anthropology here at the University of Toronto. I'm also a member of the Steering Committee of the Jewish Faculty Network, and I study Israel-Palestine and media and language. I'm here because what the students are doing is really important to us on the Jewish Faculty Network. What we see is freedom of expression, students who want to learn, academic freedom, which is at the core of universities, principles and purpose. And so I'm here to support them. I'm here to be a faculty observer and I'm here to celebrate Shabbat with them.

I'm here to support them. I'm here to be a faculty observer. And I'm here to celebrate Shabbat with them. And as more and more Jewish communities and Jewish people have become, have seen the brutality to keep these policies in place, and we're seeing now a new level of brutality with the ongoing genocide in Gaza, people are shifting and they're saying that is unacceptable. And I think that's certainly true of myself. I came from a household where, you know, I went to Camp Miriam in British Columbia as a kid. We identified very strongly with the state of Israel. But at some point, the policies of the state of Israel were no longer acceptable to me. And I realized that those policies have prevented a two-state solution from coming to place, and I've actually studied that history. So I think it's not surprising.

There's a very strong Jewish tradition of fighting for justice, for civil rights, for equality, because of our history. I come from a family that is partially from Eastern Europe, and there are many family members that I will never meet, or their descendants, because they were killed in the Holocaust. My stepfather's family, who was my dad growing up, they came from Germany. They barely got out of Germany before it was too late, 1938. So this is a heavy burden for us. We identify very strongly with justice, with justice, with pushing back against systems which discriminate. I mean, for me, really, ultimately, what I've been thinking a lot about is the fact that I'm excited to graduate and move on to this next chapter, but there are thousands of students who are exactly like me,

who are in Gaza, and their universities have been destroyed. Every single, all 12 universities in Gaza have been completely destroyed. And they should be celebrating just like me and excited to move on to the next chapter with their families and their friends. And yet they're not because their universities no longer exist. They have been pummeled to the ground and their families and members and friends have been killed. And the university that I attend has played a role in that. And as a student who goes here, who pays tuition, I find that really, truly appalling. And, you know, that's honestly the main reason I'm here.

I think that, you know, institutions like this one are supposed to be places of learning and of education and hope and optimism. So I've been at like all of the protests that we've been doing. You know, at this point, university has the administration had it really been responding to us whenever we were out in the streets. And that was incredibly frustrating because we're protesting in these meetings to have you listen to us, to have you communicate with us, to make a point, which is central to university campuses. In this institution's purpose, institutional purpose, it centers itself around being this place

for change and care, and we wanna inform the world and center knowledge and academic freedom but they don't even want to have the conversations that like are about change that might deviate from whatever you know has been like their complete normal for ages so it's a bit it's very hypocritical of the institution. From my perspective, watching them over the last seven months, they, from the beginning, have been trying to communicate to the university how much distress they're under, how difficult it is to see how the university administration responded when Russia invaded Ukraine, and how the university went out of its way to help any student of Ukrainian descent or Ukraine itself. And here

you have Palestinian students, Arab students with ties to Palestine, in many cases Muslim students who are simply very attached to and identify with Palestine, suffering, grieving, watching unbearable things happen through social media. And the university, every time we spoke to administrators and we said, why can't you do what you did for the students of Ukraine? And they didn't do anything. And the administration hasn't been responsive. So they're frustrated.

They tried, really, I saw them, dozens of meetings. They tried everything to get their demands put on the agenda of our leading university administrators. And in each case, the answer was, we can't do that. We already have channels to take care of that. Thanks for trying. That's not sufficient. It's really disappointing. Students at the University of Toronto in particular have been demanding divestment from Israeli apartheid since 2006. And there have been various waves and iterations of this movement on this campus. And this is the latest one, right? Like the University

of Toronto divested from South African apartheid in 1988. They divested from fossil fuels in 2021. Toronto divested from South African apartheid in 1988. They divested from fossil fuels in 2021. And so, you know, we know divestment is possible, right? It's not some like outlandish question. And like, as someone who helped play a role in getting the University of Toronto to divest from fossil fuels, you know, it is possible. And so I think that's the other part of it, where like, they're trying to frame it as this really outlandish thing that is so, you know, out there and crazy. And it's not. It really fundamentally is not, right? They have an ethical investments policy and all we're asking is for them to adhere to that. I think we wouldn't be at this position if we didn't have the decades of like Palestinian protesters, the decade of Palestinian organizing

that has been happening. it maybe hasn't gotten to the stage that we're at right now, but it has been a huge part of being able to have these open conversations and not like be scared to say things like this is a genocide, this is occupation, this is apartheid. And having that has a hard limit. And that is all thanks to the decades of um Palestinian organizing across the globe that has led us to this point and specifically also at this university we are not the first student organizers to do encampments in general we are not the first student organizers to care about Palestine we've been we've been protesting for Palestine on this campus for decades but I think that in this in this time now where we see all these students across the globe doing taking taking um a stand to do things

like these encampments to solidify our communities in support of Palestine it could happen now I mean we're seeing wins happen we're telling people that this is a hard deadline. Like, it can't happen anymore. We can't just sit around and be okay with, like, people dying. Many, many, many Jewish communities celebrate every Friday night, even if they don't think of themselves as super religious. You celebrate what's called Malkata Shabbat, the Queen Shabbat, with a Kabbalat Shabbat, a receiving of Shabbat on Friday evenings. As you probably know, Jewish holy days start on the evening

with the setting of the sun and when you see the first star. And so this is actually the beginning of the day of rest that we're about to celebrate together here at the People's Circle for Palestine. And so we're going to be lighting candles. We're going to be serving grape juice because it's an alcohol-free zone. But at home, we would do this with wine, usually red wine, and we're going to be breaking the challah, or challah, which is the braided bread that is made especially, and in fact my own wife made five loaves today and the other challah is made by other members of the Jewish Faculty Network, baked fresh

today to bring here in order to for us to gather as a community for us to consecrate the space because we believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people is what will actually lead to the full liberation of the Jewish people so that's what we're going to be doing we're going to be starting pretty soon with lighting the candles. And it kind of creates, you know, a space of protection, you know, not only to honor our week, our hard work, and our ability now to rest, but to honor this space that the students have created, because they believe that this is the path to liberation. They don't believe in a future where Palestinians and Jews are separate, or Arabs and Jews are separate, or Muslims and Jews, however you want to put it. Palestinians and Israelis are separate.

They realize that that future is intertwined. Palestinians are not going anywhere. Israelis aren't going anywhere. And it's a future together that, in a sense, we're celebrating today. I mean, I think the thing is that anything's impossible until suddenly it's not. You know, like, we have, like, nothing is set in stone. Like, we are constantly, as a society, evolving, changing, growing, learning, moving. And, you know, nothing is set in stone um and that goes both both directions

it goes you know that means that movements and like social change is possible and also means sometimes there are periods where institutions really double down and things you know feel immovable um and that's not to like downplay you know the immense struggle that goes into making those changes or the power structures that are at play but just to say that like the world as we know it was built by people and so we as people have the ability to rebuild the world and into the way that we want. Before establishing the encampment student protesters called on the university to end its relationship with Israeli academic institutions that, quote, operate in the occupied Palestinian territories or sustain the apartheid policies, occupation, and illegal settlement of these territories.

They also demanded U of T, quote, divest its endowment, responded, writing that breaking ties with Israeli academic institutions, quote, is at odds with the university's long-standing opposition to academic boycotts, dating back at least to the 1980s. He went on to write that University of Toronto Asset Management, quote, confirmed there are no direct holdings in the portfolios under their management that meet the criteria outlined in your demand. To move past the stalemate, students set up camp. That generated heated debates, counter-protests, the looming presence of police, fears of violence, and ultimately, a court case.

What the push and pull didn't do was open up a space for talking and thinking through the problem together. That impasse then generated fear and uncertainty, leaving the issue where? How would you describe the contemporary culture of democratic decision making? So, all right. So I think the state of our politics is one that of feeling in danger. And when we are feeling in danger, it makes perfectly good sense,

it's wise to defend ourselves. And in situ, I think the political situation we're in right now is that people feel that they cannot have a safe disagreement with somebody to explore alternative options to the two points of view being presented by the different parties. My name is Noelle McAfee. I'm the chair of the philosophy department at Emory University and a professor of philosophy. I also have a secondary appointment in the School of Medicine's Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.

So when there's a feeling that you can't safely explore alternatives, people are kind of pulled into their extreme positions. That's, I think, where we are, especially at the level of a large mass decentered society where we don't encounter people who have very different views from our own, right? Where we go to buy our coffee, where we go to buy our groceries,

those places tend to look around at people just like us, or at least we imagine just like us. So we are both entrenched in little encampments of people like-minded in finding that it's dangerous to deliberate with people from a different position. So people have their guards up and defensives up, and it's really hard to think through difficult questions. One of the things that I encounter because I do talk to people about sort of the long view about things. And one of the words that comes up that kind of really bugs me is unprecedented. It's unprecedented. This is all unprecedented, but there's always precedent. And I'm wondering in the course of the work that you've done, and in the time that you've done it,

And in the time that you've done it, is there a similar moment or a similar range of issues that you think are, you know, not entirely the same, but analogous in terms of that ethos of fear and the perception of danger that you think is really, in a way, mirrors what we're going through today. Yeah, I was a history undergraduate. I studied history, and at the end of it, I thought, what have I learned? I've learned that throughout human history, people have done horrible things to each other. That was depressing. But there is something that we can say in the past 100 years that things have taken a more extreme shape. That's not unprecedented. There've been arcs and dips throughout human history of people getting to the point where they feel very, very embattled and defensive. So it's not unprecedented, but it's not, it wasn't like this 50 years ago, when people really did, you know, have dinner and engaged often with people with very different points of view. There is a tendency, I think, to blame this moment, this culture that we're living in to the challenge of, I mean, the way that you've described it, we don't encounter difference in our daily life.

But it's precisely the presence of difference that people say, well, this is what's wrong. It's people are too different, or there's different kinds of people, and they're ruining everything. And, you know, and your work, that is part of the work that you do in terms of the application of your thinking on these issues. So can you talk a little bit about that, that's that sort of, you know, for lack of a better term, real world work that you've been doing to help communities and groups come together to deliberate? What does that look like? What has that been?

Yeah, for the past 30 years, there's two different organizations that I've worked with to help put these ideas into practice. One was the National Issues Forums Institute that would help provide briefing materials for community groups around the country, around the world, and a basic methodology on how to write up those briefing books. And the other was deliberative polling, a project that James Fishkin, professor now at Stanford University, developed using these ideas of deliberation to try to get a better sense of where people stood on issues before and after deliberating. The key

thing about, for both of these, of developing the issue books was that instead of, let's say, an issue, a crime or teenage pregnancy or name it, usually people would lay out two options. You're either for it or against it, right? Birth control, for it or against it, usually people would lay out two options. You're either for it or against it, right? Birth control, for it, against it, abortion, for it or against it. And just by laying it out as two options, it immediately polarizes that you have these two things. And each side says, here's what's great about mine and evil about yours and vice versa. So the methodology of these issue books for deliberation was to always put at least three options and always for each one lay out what's appealing about it and what's painful about it.

Right. What you have to give up or in the second one, what's appealing, what you have to give up. And the third, so that it's not polarized from the beginning. And also have all of the people involved in producing them really be honest about what are the costs and consequences and tradeoffs. So as people pick it up and start in, they'd say, oh, this looks great. And then they come across what they'd have to give up, how much that might cost, what it would mean for your neighbor down the street. So then it becomes more complexified. And then you're kind of thrown into the work of trying to decide, what are you willing to do? What are you willing to give up to go in this direction other than that one? So there's something kind of magical about this approach. So there's something kind of magical about this approach.

Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also find us wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad. Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goldtar, and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and, most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes, I just want to know more.

I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast, Crime Story, comes in. Every week, I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. For the Stoics of ancient Greece, the passions were dangerous.

Left unchecked, fear, anger, or even unbridled joy could lead us into an unthinking state and away from the use of reason. Today, we like to say facts, not feelings. In a moment of disagreement, facts can be checked and proven. But feelings? Well, feelings are gauzy and subjective. They can't be quantified. They can't be agreed upon. Yet, it's feeling that propels us to act. So, is it possible to bring people together to think through our issues and problems and include all of our reason and our passion? That's such a rich question. We could say so much about it. It reminds me first of Descartes' interlocutor, I think it was Elizabeth of Bohemia, who said, you know, you've been writing so much about reason. What about the passions?

René Descartes, the 17th century French philosopher and Elizabeth of Bohemia, exchanged letters for years. They talked about his work and body of thought, and she offered her own insights. So he wrote a book on the passions, and one of them being wonder, and it was really quite beautiful. In this episode, producer Nahid Mustafa explores the possibility for collective decision-making in an era marked by distrust and polarization. So this, yes, the dichotomy between feelings and reason is very gendered as if somehow feelings will contaminate your reasoning ability.

But we now know that this is really a false dichotomy because so much of the parts of the brain that are involved with both. I mean, people who lose their capacity to feel can start making terrible judgments. So they're connected in the brain, they're connected. But more than that, just empirically in watching people, they are not persuaded by arguments, they are persuaded by stories. So I have a couple of stories. My very first time to attend a deliberative forum, it was on the issue of hate speech, back when that was an issue, kind of a while back, 20 years ago, hate speech. And I was like a good civil libertarian, you know, sticks and stones can break my bones, Ohio, small town, Ohio.

And in this big room, this black woman stood up and said about, in response to the question about, you know, whether hate speech should be abandoned. She just, she didn't make an argument. She told a story. She said, one day I'm with my two small children. We're walking to my car and this man starts following and starts heckling and yelling out

racial slurs at us. And I was so horrified that my children had to hear this and how terrifying it was. And I heard her story and I went, wow, this changed my view. It changed my view. I had to rethink this. I'm still thinking it. I'm still thinking it right now with what's been happening this past spring with students saying, when you say those words, I feel like you want to destroy me. That's real. We can't deny that. We can't say, oh, you're just being irrational. How does one then bring together, I mean, let's be explicit, if we have a group of young people saying from the river to the sea, and we have another group of people saying, that to me sounds like that begin? Because on the face of it, it just seems there's no space to negotiate anything because it is as clear as there are two choices and one of them's got to win or else we keep fighting. I have spoken with so many people lately about different encampments.

And I want to say it might be at Brown. I'm not sure. But at one recent encampment, students sat down together and carved out some kind of rules about or some norms about how to talk and realize that when one group, just like you were recounting, one group says, when you say that, I feel like you want to destroy me. And the others say, well, maybe we don't need to say it that way. But that requires some safety. It requires, and I mean safety in a kind of psychological sense, that the people can sit down and say,

what's coming up when you use those words? What that conjures up in me when you use those words? That shifts the discussion from the meaning of the word, like the rational meaning of the word. We can pull out our etymology books. Etymology books don't help, but consult what comes up inside me. That's a way to begin it. up inside me. That's a way to begin it. There's also another story I want to recount that goes to this larger question. And that's Anthony Appiah raises it in his book. I think it's on cosmopolitanism, which is a good book for general readers. It came out a while back. And he talks about how on homosexuality and gay marriage, he wrote this, I think, even before gay marriage was enacted, that people would say, I never met somebody who was gay

and just thought it was immoral and a terrible thing. And over time would kind of have neighbors meet people, just get used to people who were gay. It's like, oh, they're human beings. So again, that's the kind of encountering people and learning who they are and what their stories are.

And then they become a human being that you can engage with, that you're human, you love your family, you care about the community, and that shifts things. So it's just false, these kind of overarching ideas we have about how culture works, that it's about reason and about individual liberties. Those are two of the most unfortunate ideas that we've inherited. So this comes out, and some feminist theorists have taken this to task. Virginia Hill did a great job of it. This kind of view of a Hobbesian, that human beings were kind of sprung out of the ground, fully formed, that they weren't vulnerable people needing mothers to take care of them. They're just fully formed, and now they've got

their bundles of liberties that are there to be protected. When we're actually, there's so much to say about that. Yeah, we could say we have a liberty, but where do they come from? What does it say about our relationship to each other? And I think it overlooks that, in fact, we're not so motivated by individual liberties, but more by fellow feeling so i'm really more drawn to this alternative theory in the history of uh our of our times

which would be more of a civic engagement i don't want to go out as far as communitarian but that a public life is not a political space where there's government and then individuals trying to be free from government intrusion, armed with their individual liberties. That's the little L liberal model that we've inherited. There's another tradition, which is that we are co-creators in a public thing, a res publica. This is the more little our Republican tradition, that we're co-creators in this. And that's what we're doing when we are getting together. We're trying to not just fight for our individual selves, but to help create our world together. One of the things that you write, public policy should be built on publicly

and deliberatively generated public will. We often we've been talking so far about people to people interactions, how to how to create some sort of deliberative process within groups or among strangers or in communities. What is the relationship of that deliberative process with the actual enacting of policy at the government level? I mean, the feeling right now is that we are completely alienated from our governments. You're American, I'm Canadian, but I think that general sensibility is it's similar across democracies right now that the people feel alienated from the government. And so how do you think about that deliberative process and its relationship to this body that we entrust to make decisions, but somehow the will of the people is kind of cleaved from it?

Yeah, let me say a little bit about public will. I get a lot of this from the late public opinion work, in a taxi, wherever, in any different venue talking over an issue. At the very beginning of a process, public opinion would bounce around wildly, up and down, up and down. But the more people would deliberate on it, it would kind of settle out and become a little more stable. You could say, he would say that they were developing a public will or public judgment. would say that they were developing a public will or public judgment. Now, I've gone back since observing these and thinking about them in writing. And I see this as what happens in

public deliberation. As we were talking before, people are encountering stories from other people, realizing that these other views are held by human beings and but also doing a what i call kind of work of mourning right let's say when i first encountered composting like what a hassle or even just recycling separating the plastic and that is i don't want to bother with that i'm not going to bother with it but then hearing more about how costly it is for the environment, how deleterious, how easy it is relatively, then I go, okay, I'm realizing the cost. I'm willing to go to the extra trouble. I'm willing to recycle. That's a will. Literally, I mean a will. I am willing to do that. I have worked through all the trouble it's going to take.

I've mourned all the losses involved. This is an easy example. But now I'm saying, okay, I'm willing. And now if the city institutes a more rigorous recycling plan, there's a public will behind it. That's literally what I mean, that public policy needs to be built on public will. Otherwise, public policy is out there and people aren't going to, I'm not going to bother with that. It's more important when it

gets to the more difficult issues. You know, right now, as the time we're recording this, the Republicans or the Democrats in the United States are trying to make the Republicans in Congress take a position on whether women should have access to contraceptives. Let's see. I mean, how much are you to vote for Republicans if they're going to take a women's right to have or couples right to have contraceptives? So these are, I find, attempts to make these abstract arguments very personal and call on people to decide what they're willing to do to have their view hold sway. But it seems that the will of the people, what the people are willing to do and even wanting to do is very, very different, especially on those big, those big issues like security, border management. You know, it seems like even abortion in the US seems like a very intangible

thing to address. People can have their feelings about it. They know what they want. But affecting change seems like something that it seems impossible because it's so politicized, and it's taken up as this other issue. It's not even a political issue. It's a moral problem. Where does that deliberative process figure into those issues that feel like they're just kind of a bit of a, they're super gauzy and they're kind of dreamlike in their distance from the ordinary citizen? they're kind of dreamlike in their distance from the ordinary, the ordinary citizen.

Well, you know, this, let's take the abortion issue, which, um, I've never said this out loud before here. I'll say it a lot of a long time ago. Um, scholars said that just letting the Supreme Court decides overnight that, you know, with Roe v. Wade, that right now abortion is a woman's right. That is going to try to do an end run about around this process of public will. Right. So, but people like me, I'm fine with the Supreme Court doing that because I think this is an important right, but then it left the country

kind of midway between working it out. And now the Supreme Court has turned around and taken it back again. So we're back to now, it's back in the hands of a kind of political process. And that's why I hate to say this out loud, but I'm going to say that we need to, we can't avoid the political process of people saying, are we really willing to take away this right from women? Are we, is that something, is that the kind of country we want to have? Right? So that has to happen. That's going to, that is happening now.

It is happening now at this moment where this, as you say, that kind of gauzy, seems like an insurmountable gap between the hallowed halls in Washington, D.C. and the hinterland. They're not that far apart because right now people are having to take up this question and make it real in their lives. Or we can talk about the student protests, these encampments and all. They have put Gaza on the agenda. It's on the agenda. This is one thing that I, in my 2019 book on fear of breakdown, politics and psychoanalysis, I develop looking at what I've learned from Daniel Kolovich, what I've learned from Jürgen Habermas, what I've learned from the National Issues Forum's work, what I've learned from my dear mentor of mine, David Matthews.

I've learned that there are kind of stages, steps that regular citizens, regular folks can take part for a healthy democracy to function. And I'm just making a claim that if this isn't happening, you cannot possibly have even a marginally healthy democracy. you cannot possibly have even a marginally healthy democracy. The things that need to happen, the first two steps briefly would be people to realize that there's more to politics than what governments do. It's what happens right here in our communities. And that I, second, I am somebody who can be an agent. I can call a meeting, call a demonstration, call a discussion to take up an issue a third and this is key third would be to identify and thematize problems or to name and frame the problems to put things

on the public agenda that's what the students do when they demonstrate that's what martin luther king you know that's what gandhi what they put things on the agenda by making a public statement in some way. And then the next one is deliberation, which we've been talking about. And then fifth would be that taking that, the harnessing public will that emerges from question, maybe look back to the beginning again. So all of those processes are things that happen in a political, in a well-functioning or decently functioning political system. That's where we are right now. By closing down the encampments and trying to skirt the whole issue, university presidents have stalled the democratic process. They don't understand how democracy works. They should take some political theory classes. Noelle McAfee has spent decades not just thinking about the principles of deliberation, but also putting those principles into action through public work. As encampments popped up across American university campuses,

she openly supported her students' right to civic engagement. Is there anything I can do for you right now? Can you call the philosophy department office and tell them I've been arrested? What you're hearing is Noelle being arrested when police raided the encampment at Emory University on April 25, 2024. The first thing in the morning I was preoccupied with getting dressed and going down and picking up the team of external reviewers who were in town for an external review of my department.

It happens once every 10 years, including a professor from Columbia. So I pick them up and then I hear that there is an encampment forming on campus to avoid the quad. Of course, my building's right on the quad. So no one's keeping us from going to our buildings. I get them settled in, have a brief meeting with them. And then I go stand in the main office looking out the window and thinking about a year ago this time, there was a group of students who were protesting what is derisively called Cop City,

which was a police training facility that the city of Atlanta, with all these other partners, was building on the indigenous land. I mean, really so troubling in so many ways. But one of the main benefactors of this would be the Atlanta Police Department. main benefactors of this would be the Atlanta Police Department. So at that time, a year ago, a year prior to that day, there were students protesting cop city on campus and the Emory president and administration called in the Atlanta Police Department to assist the Emory Police Department. And this very militarized police force, you know, all are armed up, stared down the students and the students left. It was really traumatic. I mean, they're just trying to protest. So I'm thinking that morning,

oh, I hope, I hope the president doesn't call them the APD again. That's what I'm thinking. So I said to my staff, I'm just going to go check on, check on it. So I go down, I see a colleague and who's also has the same concerns. I said, at least the APD aren't here. I mean just going to go check on it. So I go down, I see a colleague who also has the same concerns. I said, at least the APD aren't here. I mean, it was a pretty morning. We were tense, chance, faculty milling around, students walking by. And he said, oh no, the APD are here. And he pointed to the far corner and I saw them. And then we saw on the other far corner, a line of Georgia State Patrol marching up in their little hats. The Georgia State Patrol are notoriously violent police force. And so then my heart's about stopping as I see them.

And so there's a marching up and then they have surrounded a little quadrant of the quadrangle where the tents are. And then. they attacked. They just went in and started attacking the students, trying to tear down the tents, arresting students. They had all their zip ties ready. And I had my camera out and I'm thinking, okay, police do not do anything

that looks at all aggressive. So I'm standing very far away, but I'm now videoing them attacking this young student. And it was, I was horrified at the pummeling and the bashing her head on the ground. And, and I, so I'm standing back and I say, stop, stop. And the one police officer stands up and says, ma'am, you need to step back. And I thought about it. I said, no. And then he stood up and he arrested me and he dragged me off. And so that little video that you saw was taken by a graduate student that I didn't know before. And it got viewed 22 million times within two days. So I got taken to jail with 27 other people, and I was released right away.

So the moment the outside police force were brought in, that the die had been cast, I mean, this was going to be a very brutal thing. And all that I could do was to try to stand peacefully, observe, to try to minimize the violence against the students and against others. serve to try to minimize the violence against the students and against others. The role of higher education is to prepare students for civic engagement and that doesn't that to prepare them for that by giving them opportunities to do it. So that's yeah it was already too late by the time I got down there for it to go any other way. What happened here at Kent State University 50 years ago defined an age. The guardsmen opened fire on the students. 67 shots.

At an anti-Vietnam War protest, four dead, nine injured. I've never been able to just completely forget it. You know, Kent State, 1970, where students were killed, demonstrators were killed. It's been worse than this. But it is part of an arc. political systems, you know, we've got the kind of, you can see as a kind of a map, circles within the center of a big map of political systems, economic systems, higher education systems, judicial system, blah, blah, blah, economic systems. And then around the periphery are kind of big little squiggly blobs would be social movements. And they're kind of taking information from the environment broader out.

And they're serving as a sort of warning bells, sounding the alarm about issues. So one of them would be going further back, the environmental crisis, the civil rights movement, where it's these civil, the social movements that notice the issues and take them up and sound the alarm, because they have to get the attention of these bodies that don't really want to be bothered with them. They sound the alarm and they hold the system under siege, is the way Habermas puts it. And then those systems, starting with the political system, takes notice because they're now literally being held under siege that they have to do something. When I spoke to student protesters at the University of Toronto, they'd already received the president's response. The university would not engage in an academic boycott nor divest its financial holdings since it said none of its

holdings met the criteria outlined in the student's demand. But the student's passion was still part of it. You know, I think the tide is turning and things are changing and I feel like we are on the cusp of that moment. And maybe I'm wrong and maybe it's not, but just being here in the space, talking to my friends at Brown University, knowing that there's 120 of them in the U.S., that there's, you know, some in Canada, that there's some around the globe.

I saw that there were some in France, there's some in Australia, right? Like their students are rising up across the globe to demand better of their institutions. And ultimately, that gives me a lot of hope. I think regardless of what happens, the fact that we continue to come out to make the public aware is important i think that people who i think people are obviously aware like we're seeing look we're in a very visible area which is like great because when you see something like this and you're looking in you're like what is happening what's going on that's getting eyes on it and that regardless of if these people are inside or not,

if they're watching, then they're going to talk about it. And if they're talking about it, then Palestine as a word is being used. And that's a win for me because we've been in such a point where people don't even want to say the word Palestine. The letters that the administration have been sending out in the beginning was like, oh, the situations and out like in the beginning was like oh the the situations and the concerns in the middle east but they're too scared to even say the name palestine but that can't happen because it's a part of like the dehumanizing strategy the way that they

dehumanize us but we are people we stand here and if you see all these messagings around with like names of the places in palestine we've got the names of the cities around the encampment it's on our tents that's important because it solidifies us it legitimizes like our our place in people's minds in a way that they can't keep ignoring because now when you hear Palestine you think of stuff like this when you hear Palestine it you think of stuff like this. When you hear Palestine, it reminds you of like, oh, that's a place that exists. There's something happening there. I have to look into this. The thought I began with about how we're feeling danger, we need to put up, we need to draw up the moat, right? Draw up the drawbridge, defend the garrison against the attackers. And that's the kind of culture we're in. Now,

I'm not sure that this is unprecedented, but it is happening more than it was happening before. But I know it happened before then too. Like in human history, there've been times when people have had to get very, very defensive. So at the political level, I think we're in a paranoid schizoid politics where people have become very defended, feel under attack, and cannot tolerate the ambiguities, the range of variety, the indeterminacy that can be inside that garrison, right? The tough part is that in a paranoid schizoid politics, at any level, it could be in university governance. It's like a really good place for politics. In university governance, you can feel like

this other person, maybe another colleague, is out to destroy me, and they're acting like they are. Everybody's gotten in this place, and so it brings out the worst in everyone. So it becomes easier to demonize other people because everybody seems to be acting badly. So it's important to try to find a way to shift the culture to create different kinds of forums for discussion that are more exploratory. And that's another way of thinking about a safe space, the way we're talking about it, a place that it feels that defenses are less necessary because we are willing to hear different points of view. You've been listening to Deliberation in a Time of Anger

by Ideas producer Nahid Mustafa. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. The senior producer is Nikola Lukšić. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.