Origin Story: The Roots of Learning Life

The Vicious Cycle of Terrorism & Authoritarian Reaction

On the evening of Friday, November 13, 2015, a series of coordinated terrorist attacks in and near Paris killed 130 people, and wounded over 400.  It was the deadliest terrorist attack in the European Union since the 2004 Madrid train bombings, which killed 193 people, and wounded more than 2,000.  Who that lived in the United States on September 11, 2001 can forget those attacks that took nearly 3,000 lives, and wounded more than 6,000?  And, who that lived in Israel on October 7, 2023 will forget the terrorism that killed 1,200?  Terrorism is horrifying, and it keeps happening. 

Violent reactions to terrorism are also horrifying, and often far deadlier, as Iraqis, Afghans and Palestinians, among others, can tragically attest. 

Terrorism and authoritarianism feed on each other in a vicious cycle.  Terrorists attack. Terrified publics demand authoritarian reaction.  Politicians, willingly or reluctantly, tap into people’s tribalism, fear and resentment to seize or secure their power, by force or ballot.  Terrorists in turn appeal to those marginalized and disgruntled – some of them the prey and victims of authoritarian reaction – to conduct further attacks.  The vicious cycle begins anew. 

Together, terrorists and authoritarians thus now pose two of the most significant threats to democracies across the world. 

Authoritarian War’s Lasting Imprint

In June 1940, my French-American father, Francois Lachelier, his mother, sister, and brother, fled France on the last boat to the United States after the Nazis invaded France.  On the way to the USA, a Nazi submarine stopped the ship but then let it continue on its journey, unlike the more than 3,600 other ships the Nazis sank from 1939 to 1945 during World War II’s long “Battle of the Atlantic.” 

When the ship arrived in New York, my father’s entry was called into question because, unlike his mother and siblings, who were born in the USA, he was born in France.  Further, his father, my grandfather, was French.  Together, these facts at the time legally made my father French, not American.  Fortunately, my father was allowed entry, so years later he was able to meet my mother in New York, marry, and have four children.  Otherwise, I may never have been born.   

Born in 1935, my mother, Ana Antuna, too was marked by World War II.  She remembers sirens going off, blackout shades, and lights turned off in New York when Nazi submarines were close.  She also remembers one of her brothers dying at age 23 from lymphatic cancer, suspected from exposure to radar technology during his service in the U.S. Air Force.  Another of her brothers returned home from duty on a hospital ship in the Pacific Theater of World War II with what is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder.  He would sit for hours staring out the window without saying a word.    

More than half a century later, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 changed the course of my sister Suzanne Lachelier’s life.  In reaction to those attacks, the U.S. government built a prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to house hundreds of people suspected of being involved in the 9/11 attacks.  In 2008, as a U.S. Navy defense attorney with considerable experience, my sister was called to defend some of the highest-profile 9/11 detainees.  She has been doing this work ever since. 

Shaped by history, my parents’ and sister’s experiences proved formative.  My father’s move from France to the USA cultivated in him an abiding interest in politics and wariness of demagogues.  My mother’s memories of her brothers damaged and dead due to war helped fuel her own lifelong attention to politics, and helped turn her into a counter-military-recruiting activist in her 60s following 9/11.  I absorbed my parents’ attention to politics, and learned the word “demagogue” from my father, who warned:

“Beware those who wrap themselves in their nation’s flag.” 

Thus, for my parents, as for so many others who lived through World War II, the legacy of violence and death caused by authoritarians left a lasting imprint.  My sister’s legal legacy, in turn, has been shaped by terrorism and the U.S.’s own authoritarian reaction. 

Culture, Democracy & Citizen (Dis-)Engagement

After marrying in 1961 in New York, my parents decided to move from the United States to France in 1970 following the tumult of the 1960s in the USA – from President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and the intensifying Vietnam War protests, to the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy.  In April 1972, I was born in Neuilly, just west of Paris, the youngest of four children. 

Eleven years later, my mother decided it was time to return to the United States, to be closer to her family, and to get the special education my dyslexic brother needed.  Thus, in August 1983, my family moved from Orgeval, a village in France, just west of Paris, to the USA, in Bloomfield, Connecticut, just north of Hartford.  Up to that point, I had lived in France since birth, so I felt more French than American. 

My own transition from France to the USA spurred in me an interest in culture, that mostly unseen shaper and mover of our thoughts and actions.  As a French pre-teen absorbing American culture, I was struck by differences.  Americans, it seemed to me at the time, joke and laugh a lot more than the more sober, argumentative French, so I had to develop a sense of humor to adapt.  The 1980s American teen boy’s “cool” joking manner took some getting used to.  As early as twelve, I also started working out with weights, like many American boys and unlike a lot of French boys.  And in my 20s, I became a vegetarian for eight years, convinced that it was the right thing to do for animals, my own health and the planet.  My vegetarianism, like bodybuilding, accorded less with the French artful pursuit of pleasures, and more with American values I inculcated, like virtue-seeking, discipline and hard work. 

I took my early interest in culture through my Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with a focus on American political culture and citizen participation in democracy.        

Among the books I read in college and graduate school, two have had the most lasting impact: sociologist Robert Bellah and his colleagues’ Habits of the Heart, and the French political theorist, Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic, Democracy in America.  The former impressed upon me that culture is often invisible.  Our habits of thinking and acting seem natural, taken-for-granted until we interact with people in or out of our country with different cultures.  Habits of the Heart also conveyed that culture has consequences: it can make it easier or harder for us to connect with others, from family to strangers, and to get things done together.

Tocqueville’s Democracy in America in turn taught me that freedom can be not just individual license, but collective self-government, that democracy needs citizens who work together to address common problems, yet that modern individualism inclines people to withdraw into the comforts of what Tocqueville called “small private circles” of friends and family.  Tocqueville feared that “softly despotic” governments would gladly facilitate that withdrawal from public life together as citizens in order to seize more power and undermine democracy.  My own sense is that in capitalist democracies, it is less governments than businesses that would prefer citizens withdraw from public life in order to better secure businesses’ profits and influence on governments.  The archetype of the modern consumer is absorbed in work, family and to a growing extent pleasures, if not addictions – from the latest influencer-peddled product fads, to streaming-series or porn binges, to gaming and gambling.  That consumer is far more pliant and profitable than a capable, connected and caring citizen.   

As a sociologist, my research and observations of American political culture underscore that like other democracies, the United States faces the risk of opposite dangers when it comes to citizen participation: the passions of a few, and the apathy of most.  The passions of the few wax and wane over decades but draw a lot of attention when they wax precisely because of their passion. The majority’s relative apathy is so commonplace and quiescent it is usually ignored.  Some political scientists believe it is not a problem for democracies that most citizens pay little attention to politics precisely because the most engaged few also tend to be the most passionate, sometimes violently so.  But as Trump voters – many of whom were previously more or less politically disengaged, and some of whom kind of liked the Trump they saw on TV – demonstrate, political disengagement can devolve into alienation, and alienation to authoritarianism and violence – precisely the kind of citizen engagement political scientists rightfully find so troubling.    

Ordinary vs. Extraordinary Participation: Democracy Thick & Thin

On a sunny April 18, 2001, around 1pm, 46 students packed down with food, sleeping bags and other material rushed into Massachusetts Hall, one of Harvard University’s main administrative buildings, beginning what would become the longest sit-in in Harvard’s long history, all in the name of living wages for the university’s lowest paid workers. 

Over the next 20 days, thousands of students, workers and area residents gave of their time and energy for the modest proposition that Harvard, the wealthiest university in the world with an endowment of over $19 billion at the time ($42 billion as of 2020), should pay its workers a living wage of at least $10.25 an hour, the same living wage the surrounding city of Cambridge pays its workers.  On Tuesday May 8, 21 days after the sit-in had begun, Harvard administrators agreed to consider the recommendations of a newly-created living wage committee composed of faculty, administrators, students and workers. 

Seven months later, on December 18, that committee issued its recommendations, calling on Harvard to pay its lowest-paid workers a living wage, but falling short of the activists’ call to adjust the wage annually for inflation to prevent erosion. 

Looking back, aside from its duration and destiny in some Harvard history books, there is another, more important sense in which the sit-in was “historic”, a sense with implications for people everywhere: Harvard students made history in so far as they became agents in their own world, acting upon rather than passing through the institution which forms them.  However, despite the congratulation which often proceeds such activism, these extraordinary ways of making history – such as sit-ins, strikes, and walkouts – pose a fundamental problem: just as such activism confirms the power of ordinary people to resist and challenge elite power, it also confirms the power of elites to daily determine our lives, the fleeting nature of our power as ordinary people, and the accordingly profound paucity of participatory democracy.  

On Wednesday May 9, 2001, within one day after the living wage sit-in ended, Harvard administration quickly cleaned, deodorized and reclaimed Mass Hall, and cleared Harvard Yard of all traces of politics, returning the area to a silent, faceless space on the way to somewhere else.  Harvard became Harvard again, an elite-controlled institution through which students pass.

I was one of the 46 students who participated in that 2001 Harvard living wage sit-in.  The account above is part of my reflection on the sit-in that led to a 2002 article then a 2004 conference paper.  In these writings, I draw on sociologist Richard Flacks’s 1998 book, Making History.  In the book, Flacks shares a crucial insight: in elite-dominated societies, “those positioned to participate in elite transactions can influence the terms and conditions of a collectivity’s daily life as an inherent part of their own daily routine.  Those without such position can influence history to the degree that they have the ability to disrupt elite plans or the processes of daily life” (p.70). 

In reflecting on Flacks’s insight in the early 2000s, I distinguished between ordinary versus extraordinary activism, but in retrospect, activism is better termed “participation” lest this be viewed as the concern strictly of a few passionate people, rather than all of us.  Both forms of participation engage ordinary people in what Flacks calls “making history,” that is, shaping the policies or decisions that affect their lives.  Extraordinary participation, often articulated among leftists as “resistance” or “protest,” however requires that people stop their work, family and/or other ordinary responsibilities in order to take part. Examples include sit-ins, strikes, rallies, demonstrations, pickets, vigils, fasts, and civil disobedience.  In contrast, ordinary participation is woven into the routines of people’s everyday lives, and hence does not require people to stop their work, family and other ordinary responsibilities.  Examples include running consumer or worker cooperatives, and people’s regular participation in decision-making via government, unions, civic groups, or political parties. 

The fact that in democratic nations, a small, socio-economically privileged minority of activists and professionals dominate political participation, and make the decisions which affect us all is a problem because their decisions will tend to skew in their interests. Meanwhile, that most citizens of democratic nations occasionally, rarely, or never pay attention let alone participate in policy-making is a problem because policymakers’ decisions will conversely neglect or undermine their interests. That participation in government is for most people a sacrificial interruption rather than a taken-for-granted routine of daily life is thus a problem.  These are social problems – not inevitabilities. Extraordinary participation does not ultimately overcome these problems. Ordinary participation can. This is the core difference between weak and strong, or thin and thick democracy, between the routine versus at best occasional practice of self-determination.

If democracy is to survive and thrive, it will be because many more people rally to support it rather than destroy it.  At its best, democracy is not just a form of government, but a lifestyle of ordinary rather than extraordinary citizen participation.  Active citizens are not born, they are made through participation, and participation is best cultivated in communities where people young and old, novice and experienced, build relationships, learn together, and practice democracy.  That is why since 2019 Learning Life is leading the development of a Democracy Learning Community in the Washington DC capital region. 

Globally Entangled Yet Detached 

“For better or worse, America is the 800-pound gorilla in every room in the world.  When it has an itch, the world scratches.  When it gets a cold, the world sneezes.  Its actions – and its failures to act — often send ripples around the globe,” the scholars Peter Schuck and James Q. Wilson wrote in their preface to Understanding America, a 2008 compendium on “American institutions, cultures and policies.”  More than fifteen years later, this is still true, even as other nations, like China, India, Russia, South Africa and Brazil exert more influence.  Americans though have been, and remain largely unaware of their country’s expansive imprint on the world, in economics, politics, culture and the environment.  Yet as 9/11 showed, ignorance can be deadly, not only for Americans who may know nothing of their country’s foreign entanglements, but for the world that faces their consequent rage.    

Politics and economics are inescapable in modern societies.  Governments now have the power to shape most things, from the air we breathe, to the food we eat, to our homes, cars and jobs, to our health, longevity and death.  And economics in our globalized world connect us with strangers near and far who, like us, make and consume goods and services from across the world.  The juice I drink, the car I drive, the phone and laptop I use, and the many other materials of my everyday life come from diverse countries around the world.  Every day that we step into cars, buses, trains, our work, schools, supermarkets, and other settings of everyday life, we step into the world, usually unknowingly.  The world’s peoples are, to borrow from the American philosopher, Michael Sandel, politically and economically entangled, yet socially detached.  We affect each other, yet don’t know each other. 

Citizen Diplomacy for a More Caring World

In 2009 and 2011, while I was an assistant professor of sociology at Stetson University in Florida, I organized two live international dialogues online between students.  The first dialogue, which occurred on November 20, 2009, while the U.S. Congress struggled over whether to pass “Obamacare,” engaged Stetson students with students at the University of Paris 8 on the role of government in modern societies.  The second dialogue, on October 18, 2011, months after the Arab Spring in Egypt ended the thirty-year rule of Hosni Mubarak, connected Stetson students with students at the American University in Cairo to discuss the role of media in social change.    

Reflecting on the first dialogue in an article published in 2009, I wrote: “Throughout human history, political, business and cultural elites have had a virtual monopoly on dialogue with the wider world, and they have frequently used it to advance their interests.  Of course, some ordinary people and the poorest have had contact with the foreign, but their contact has too often been compelled by survival and strife.”  This consequential inequality in engagement with the wider world still holds true today, but the internet, cell phones, social media and videoconferencing can and are – when used properly, in no small part through sustained, moderated dialogue – opening possibilities for a more just, participatory future.    

Then, the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks spurred the launch of Learning Life’s Family Diplomacy Initiative (FDI) in 2016.  FDI addresses the vicious cycle of terrorism and authoritarian reaction by leveraging the family, that institution most widely valued worldwide across lines of politics, class, race and ethnicity.  Families are a broadly resonant yet largely untapped force for a less violent, more caring world.  Accordingly, FDI is working to (a) connect people worldwide through dialogue about families and major threats they face (i.e., poverty, war, climate change, gender-based violence and the internet), and (b) identify and train motivated volunteer family diplomats across the globe to become effective advocates for families in media, nonprofits, businesses and governments.    

Like FDI, Learning Life’s Citizen Diplomacy International (CDI) works to meet the global challenge that people tend to be politically and economically entangled, yet socially detached.  Established in 2020, and a part of Learning Life since 2023, CDI gathers students, scholars, professionals, and observers worldwide quarterly to share news and presentations on citizen diplomacy (CD) research and practice is the first of several steps planned for building a vibrant global CD sector for a more participatory, peaceful world.  In such a world, diplomacy becomes not just the profession of a privileged few, but also a wider public endeavor, so professional and citizen diplomats can work side-by-side to build a more caring world.    

Nurturing Connected, Capable and Caring Citizens

Let us step back to piece these stories and reflections together. 

The life and trajectory of my family, like so many other families, has been marked by terrorism and authoritarianism.  But whether or not you or your family has been impacted by terrorism and authoritarianism, all of us live in a world where we are simultaneously intertwined, yet detached.  Whether we overcome our divisions and detachment depends not just on our leaders, but on us, as citizens of countries and this world we share in common. 

Our world needs more connected, capable and caring citizens, but such citizens are not born, they are made.  And, they are made over time, in dialogue, learning and acting together in communities that bridge our differences, cultivate caring, and get us participating in power in ordinary rather than extraordinary ways, that is, as a regular part of, rather than an interruption from our lives. 

There is no silver bullet, no demagogue wrapped in their country’s flag who will save us.  We have to save us.  Deep, lasting change, not short-term programs or solutions, will take lots of connected, capable and caring people.  It will take a learning life, in diverse learning communities of citizen diplomats and democrats, blending learning with action.