The last time I got sick (just a cold, you know the drill), I was sweating on the couch, head aching, trying to distract myself with bad television. But it wasn’t working. Not surprising in itself, but what was more unusual was that my mind kept wondering what exactly my body was doing in this fight. As a child, I had learned that the fever is the trick: your body heats up until the virus can’t cope. Even half-delirious, I was sure it had to go deeper than that; who’s to say I wouldn’t cook before the virus did?
Mid-thought, the heat and the bad TV loosened the mental walls between my body holding off an infection and the body politic holding off democratic backsliding and misinformation and managing its intolerance to otherness. For a feverish moment, they were the same problem, and the TV, still blaring in the background, was summarily ignored as I fell down the rabbit hole of learning about the immune system.
The Backroom Politics of the Lymphatic System
It turns out that a fever is just one of many mechanisms the body deploys to keep us safe from infection and illness. There are also tiny temporary “rooms” that pop up in your lymph nodes when you’re sick. In these spaces, immune cells deliberately mutate into thousands of slightly different versions of themselves and compete for a scarce survival signal that only the closest matches receive. The winners get copied by the billion. The losers die. From a few hundred genetic fragments, your body improvises billions of distinct antibodies that are ready for invaders it has never met. Five hundred million years of biological code was running in the background as I read and re-read about my immune system.
It occurred to me that these immunity rooms were like deliberative assemblies! In these groups, we try a lot of different formulations, stress test them, and compare and contrast. Then, once the mini-public lands on the right “shape,” or solution, that gets copied and circulated into the larger body politic.
It’s no surprise my fever brain connected these dots. A body and a body politic are solving the same shape of problem. How do you defend an open system against an unbounded range of threats with finite resources and without destroying the very thing you are trying to protect? The body has had eons to work on it; complex bodies politic, a few thousand years at most.
Of course, the deeper I looked, the more the parallels I had drawn started to look like funhouse mirrors. But I was genuinely inspired by a few of the things that I learned about how the body keeps itself safe.
The first concept is how the body makes a problem legible. An immune system never tackles a virus whole; a specialized cell swallows the invader, chops it into small fragments, and holds them up on its surface like a row of locks. Only the immune cells carrying a key that fits a specific lock get to multiply. The body does not need to know in advance how to fight the virus. It breaks the threat into targets so precise that a working answer is unmistakable the moment that one clicks into place.
Picking the Lock
As a working body politic, we also need to break threats into smaller targets. Successful assemblies spend their first weeks learning. Ireland’s citizens were briefed for months before they touched the issue of abortion. France’s climate convention ran an entire appropriation phase. Democracy is good at predigesting the topic. What we struggle with is predigesting the political problem until it is framed sharply enough that one can tell exactly when deliberation has picked the lock, or clicked onto the appropriate solution.
Last week, I watched a citizen assembly as they received vague feedback from the government. The assembly had not been “specific enough about how cycle lanes should be safer.” The group was taken aback: “What do they mean? Isn’t it obvious?” The assembly then elaborated on what can be found in any published bike-safety guide: separate, colored, physically protected lanes that don’t end abruptly. What was not explained was the corresponding political lever: the cost-versus-safety tradeoff of redoing the network of bike lanes and the priority of this against all other recommendations. Those real, contextual, political questions went unanswered because the problem, or question, was not presented precisely. Learning about the immune system helped me understand that we need to put the actual tradeoffs in front of citizens as they deliberate in such a way that we can all see when the lock clicks open.
The second thing I learned was both obvious and counterintuitive. Most of the time, what your immune system does is not attack. The gut carries trillions of bacteria that aren’t part of the body; a pregnant body carries a child that is, immunologically, half-foreign. The immune system must spend energy, continuously, holding itself back. A whole class of cells (regulatory T-cells, the subject of last year’s Nobel Prize) exists to whisper “relax, count to 10, calm down” to the cells that would otherwise turn on the body’s own tissue and its useful flora and fauna. Tolerance, it turns out, is not the absence of conflict. It is active, paid-for, continuously maintained suppression of the impulse to attack what’s different. Stop paying that tolerance tax, and the body attacks itself and dies.
In the body politic, that tax has line items. It is the space held by a well-trained facilitator in a town hall meeting, the necessary decorum for the peaceful transfer of power. It shows up as that special discomfort of defending the right to speak freely of those we disagree with. In families and friendships it might show up together with those magic words, “Let’s agree to disagree.”
The body has no lobby, no donors, no faction that profits when the immune system turns on the host. A society has all three of these to contend with. So the questions the body never has to ask become the most difficult political ones: Who decides which difference gets protected, and who pays for the hard work of tolerance? Where do we draw the line? Who even is “we”? That is the real work of democratic immunity, and it’s not something we can afford to do once every few years. It is, and must be, a daily practice.
Jorim Theuns is the cofounder of Dembrane, a civic and deliberative tech initiative dedicated to transforming how democratic participation works in everyday life. At the heart of Dembrane’s work is the belief that democracy should be more than a political event every few years, it should be part of how we govern our cities, design public services, and make collective decisions.
Resilience & Resistance is a Charles F. Kettering Foundation blog series that features the insights of thought leaders and practitioners who are working to expand and support inclusive democracies around the globe. Direct any queries to [email protected].
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What a Fever Taught Me About Democratic Resilience – Kettering Foundation
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