Chase Thomas ‘29 (DCI Fellow)
It had been 40 days since Charlie Kirk’s assassination, and yet I found myself in a Zoom room of people who hadn’t ever heard his name. On October 20, I led a deliberation surrounding the implications of Charlie Kirk’s death with the Global Futures Group.
Composed of doctors, social workers, businessmen, mechanical engineers, academics, housing advocates, and others over the age of 60, the Global Futures Group meets twice a month via Zoom to discuss the most pressing challenges facing humanity.
Inspired by The Millennium Project’s 15 Global Challenges, we discuss everything from the harms of artificial intelligence to the psychological impacts of political violence.
Towards the end of the deliberation, a participant declared he had questions specifically for me. I sat up straight and fiddled with my notes. One by one, each question punched me in the stomach. “Why are the youth resonating with these values? How could they believe all of this? Do your friends believe this?”
I was suddenly tasked with representing my entire generation. I threw up words until I realized the impossibility of providing a satisfactory answer to his questions. For weeks after the deliberation, I ruminated over his questions and my deficient response. I was caught up on one word: “resonating.” The word slipped from his lips as if it gestured toward something inherent and collective, an established commonality among those orbiting my age.
In A Nuts and Bolts Guide from the Public Conversations Project, Maggie Herzig and Laura Chasin emphasize the challenging dynamic of “The Isolate” in deliberations: “When someone has a different viewpoint than the rest, it makes that person both particularly valuable for the diversity they can bring and particularly vulnerable to feeling on the spot” (86).
Not only did I immediately feel this sense of heightened vulnerability during the deliberation, but I also realized that I felt trapped. Speaking for oneself frees the deliberator. On the other hand, speaking for or defending a “group” decreases nuance in the deliberation because the focus shifts to bigger divides, preventing the group from engaging with smaller points of difference.
As a deliberator-turned-facilitator, I ask what should I do if one aspect of an individual’s worldview is different from all the others present in the conversation?
Herzig and Chasin suggest the following:
- Check in with the individual during a break, privately
- Share observations with the entire group and say why this pattern concerns you
- After a few meetings, the facilitator can ask the group to consider the pros and cons of recruiting another member or two whose views are more similar to those of the isolate
- Make a suggestion or ask the participants about how the conversation may need to shift if the group is to achieve their purposes (This rests on the assumption that the group’s purposes were discussed and defined at the start, and that the facilitator told the group that everyone must speak for themselves)
You may ask, why should I speak for myself?
Herzig and Chasin posit that individuals potentially speak for others if they belong to a less individualistic society or have experienced systemic patterns of oppression and feel as though they have not been seen by others as individuals (10). However, collective group identity does have value; it is sometimes very important to focus on overall trends to identify systemic issues in order to foster social change and implement improvements for the betterment of certain communities. This “we” can also provide a sense of belonging, shared purpose, and psychological safety. Furthermore, deliberators may speak for others to increase perceived legitimacy, objectivity, or support for their case.
The goal of inclusion in deliberation is not blindness to the point of ignorance. Because society assigns meaning to constructs like race and gender, people’s life views are shaped by these categories to a certain extent, creating diverse, often unequal, experiences of the world. John Rawls’ famous veil of ignorance, as part of his theory of justice, proposed that participants should blind themselves to their own self-interests to be unaware of their standpoint. While his thought experiment is an important
democratic and egalitarian vision, it begins at the ideal instead of working towards it. We tell individuals in deliberation that they have an equal status in the deliberation, which does relate to Rawls’ ideals. However, it is important to achieve a balance between assuming equality in deliberation and working towards achieving equality in the world through deliberation.
Furthermore, as a facilitator, one can ensure that minority or absent perspectives are included in a deliberation by conducting a thorough stakeholder analysis and using the discussion guide.
On the other hand, it is crucial to speak for yourself to fight intra-group bias. You can have a different perspective than someone who looks like you, dresses like you, or wears the same political label as you. This is why it is consistently stressed in deliberative settings to avoid general, sweeping statements. Like intra-group bias, essentialism also posits that there are certain traits tied to categories humans have constructed, such as gender, race, religion, and political ideology. Therefore, speaking for yourself in deliberative contexts prevents prejudice, black-and-white thinking, and polarization. While speaking for (or with) others can bring justice into the conversation, so can your own individual perspective. You need to bring your unique lived experiences to the table, cultivating autonomy, trust, and introspection.
