Teodros Kiros - Book Review: Frances Moore Lappe, Getting A Grip 2

Book Review
Frances Moore Lappé , Getting A Grip 2,
(Small Planet Media, 2010)

18 February, 2010 | Teodros Kiros (Ph.D)

Getting A Grip 2,

like Getting a Grip,

Lappé’s first masterpiece, is propelled

by a powerful vision of human beings as

self-empowering moral subjects capable

and willing to live Democracy, as clear,

creative, courageous beings with

transformative ideas, a living function of

the fact that human beings are

creatures of mind, and that they are

capable of constructing themselves as creative beings.

I too have argued for this thesis in Self-Construction and the Formation of
Human Value: Truth, Language and Desire (Praeger, 1999). I join Lappé that
humans are value-creating beings under a democratically infused vision of human
beings as power generating beings with ideas.

Indeed, clarity, creativity and courage are precisely the foundations of Living
Democracy, the nerve center of our humanity.

Years of systematic brainwashing had taught human beings that they are greedy,
selfish, unsocial and competitive. Moreover, they were also taught that
democracy is nothing more than voting and participating in the market motivated
by the profit motive. Lappé calls this Thin Democracy, which she contrasts with
Living Democracy. Even if these narratives of human nature are not true, it is
enough that humans believe in them and practice them, as those who believe will
inevitably develop these features by practicing them. As Aristotle has correctly
taught that virtues and vices become our living features by practice. What we call
human nature is essentially taught through a repeated practice, which then
becomes a habit. Lappé brilliantly contemporanizes this classic insight with
remarkable clarity and power.

Suppose, however, that the same human beings are told and taught that they are
cooperative, social, sharing and kind. If they were to consistently practice these
virtues, they essentially evolve into possessing them.

Lappé’s Living Democracracy is driven by the second conception of human nature.
For Lappé, the creative, courageous, and internally powerful human beings, life is
not merely brutish, nasty and short, but rather fair and cooperative (p, 23)

Thin democracy does not encourage individuals to tap into their creativity, master
their courage, conquer their fear and change their condition, when everyday life
requires it. Instead, courage is overwhelmed by fear, hope is conquered by
despair, change is silenced by powerlessness, and transforming the human
condition is displaced by resignation. In direct contrast, living democracy builds on
the hidden resources of individuals. Clarity, creativity, courage and internal power,
the potential virtues of democratic citizens turn toward life. (P, 27)

Living democracy needs new eyes. We need to begin seeing differently, by
engaging our clear, creative, appropriately fearful and internally powerful senses.
Living democracy as a way of life, demands that we engage ourselves with life’
challenges in a concrete way. Change is fundamentally an inner experience, which
then spills over the external world. A changed individual can then seek to change
the external world. The inner world is a world of fear, impossibility, but also hope
and change. Living Democracy is dynamic cycle of hope and fear, fear and hope.

When we live democracy, we are not spectators but problem solvers. As Lappé
puts it best, “ My point is that we humans can be both disgustingly brutal and
beautifully cooperative and empathetic. In large measure, it is our ideas about
ourselves that determine the rules and norms we create and enforce, which then
elicit our slimy or splendid selves” (p, 27)

Getting A Grip 2 is described by some of my students at Berklee College, as a
living bible. Indeed it is.