With our new worship series—We the People—I’ve been thinking a lot about democracy. I’ve been reading a book about the Declaration of Independence (more on that next week) that has inspired me with our founders’ vision, even with its imperfections. And in the midst of working on last Sunday’s message, I found myself falling into the rabbit hole that is Google’s Ngram Viewer.
Are you familiar with the Ngram? It’s a nifty, free tool that graphs our collective usage of common words over time. You choose the words to search, and you set the parameters (as far back as 1500 C.E.!), and it provides you with a graph showing how often that word has gotten used.
It’s fascinating. I searched my name—Lee—and found it interesting that it showed up a lot in the 1500-1700 timeframe, after which it leveled out to near-obscurity. Looking at a single word is misleading, though, because the scale of the graph (on the Y-Axis) adjusts with every change.
So, for instance, when I add “John” to the Ngram input list I discover that “Lee” far outpaces it, whether I’m looking at 1700-2022 (the most recent year you can choose) or 1950-2022. This is true even when I pick “American English”—which doesn’t really make sense to me. (Are that many people talking about Robert E. Lee?)
Even the name “Marcia” way exceeds “John” for a noteworthy period in the early 1700s. I don’t know who that famous Marcia was, but I think it’s fair to say she (?) has been forgotten in the intervening centuries.
I went to the Ngram last week to look not at names, but at democracy. I said last Sunday that “democracy” seems to be on everyone’s mind these days. I wanted to see how that was reflected in the Ngram.
First of all, the use of the term “democracy” is almost nil in 1700, even though the concept of democracy had its origins centuries earlier. Its use grows through the 18th and 19th centuries until it reaches a peak in 1940—not surprisingly, with the threat of fascism in Nazi Germany. After a rather steep decline and limited revival until 1979, we have evidently talked much more about democracy ever since—all the way to a peak in 2018 which I think would be exceeded today if the Ngram went all the way to the present.
All this of course is based on books and other writings that have been fed into the database behind all this, and I’ll admit I haven’t gone far enough into this rabbit hole to fully understand the mechanics and limitations of these results. But it’s curious, isn’t it, that a concept that has such distant origins is so much on our minds—and evidently on our pens and our lips—in our lifetimes.
With “democracy,” as with the names I mentioned earlier, it’s easier to see what this means if you add additional terms. So I did that. I added a number of terms that get talked about in our democracy: crime, economy, climate, health care, immigration, and more. Subjects on which we do not all agree. Scroll down to look at that chart. When you look at the “democracy” line in the midst of all these words, you can still see its increase, but at a much smaller pace than some other words, like “climate,” “crime,” and “economy.”
“Crime” seems extra interesting to me on this chart. It’s the highest—by far, back in the 1700s. Then it declines, until it ramps up again in the past six decades. From what I know about actual crime numbers, I think its decline reflects centuries and decades when crime was decreasing. Its subsequent increase correlates (in ways I don’t have the savvy to show you) with a time when crime has continued to decrease! But the use of the word—the rhetoric and political focus on “CRIME”–has long been a winning point for (white) politicians on both sides of the aisle, so we talk about it even when the experts say it is a declining worry. Not to mention the more recent issue of algorithms and eyeballs and news cycles in which crime sells, and gets clicks, and makes people fearful. All of which affects political alignment and voting and partisan politics.
“Economy” is similarly curious. It’s the clear “winner” in the past century. I’m not sure that’s because it’s such a worry for us? Or because we have focused so widely on economic indicators and measures that we use the terms of “economy” the way we drink water? Of course “the economy” has been central in several recent elections, but it’s curious to me that it’s been at such a high but relatively consistent level for such a long time.
I could play with all this for a very long time.
I said I fell into this rabbit hole, preparing for Sunday’s message. I find it curious—I find myself curious—whether this list of subjects that I graphed in this little exercise represents what we really care about, and changes in that level of care, where our nation is concerned. Or whether it reflects that certain topics become “hot” and gather a lot of momentum—not because they’re the things that keep us awake at night, but because they get said so much in the public square that they end up disproportionately represented in this kind of a grid.
As we continue thinking about “We the People” between now and February 15, I want us to wonder how ready we, and those around us, are able to name or articulate what we really care about. There are things we don’t like, probably, that our elected officials are carrying out. We can spend a lot of time dissing and fighting against those ills. But when it comes to how we live, and what we need—what would maximize our “Safety and Happiness,” to use a concept from the Declaration of Independence—we rarely have that conversation.
When did someone—anyone!—last ask you, “What gets in the way of you and people you care about being safe and happy?” If you had the power to do it, how would you keep yourself and people you love safe and happy? These aren’t questions about amassing wealth and partying all the time. They get at happiness in the terms I mentioned last Sunday: stability, peace, “living well.”
That’s the kind of conversation we’re working toward in the series of Conversation Circles we’ll kick off in February. First, here at CW, and subsequently, in our neighborhoods. All feeding into greater facility as participants in a democratic society. In support of our democracy, our life together as citizens. On the other side of some 3,000 conversations happening around Iowa in the next four months, we’ll identify leaders and themes that will guide our work locally and feed into a 1000-person AMOS convention. At that event, the afternoon of Sunday, August 30, we’ll present our emergent issue agenda to candidates for local, state, and national elected offices and secure their commitments to work with us to address these priorities. **Did you mark your calendar yet?**
And having grown in our relational connections with one another and our neighbors, we’ll be better prepared to do ministry, to serve, and to work together toward those aspects of safety and happiness that will benefit us all.
Now that may feel like a rabbit hole to you. Maybe that always happens when we begin to think bigger about what is possible, and with whom, for the good of others.
