Emerson’s Self-Reliance makes a provocative case for cultivating the self and shunning morality in the form of obligations to others. One famous paragraph begins, “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. … Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” The same paragraph ends with an argument against charity as an entanglement that damages integrity: “do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.”
Emerson strongly favors interacting with other minds, especially the geniuses who figure in the books that he devours in his private hours. Moses, Pythagoras, Plato, Socrates, Jesus, Luther, Milton, Copernicus, and Newton are just some of the names he invokes in Self-Reliance. He thinks these people (all men) had distinct and invariant characters. “For I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies of his will are rounded in by the law of his being.” Thus, to understand an author is to grasp something unitary and unique about him that inspires you to enrich your own equally coherent character, not by sharing his truth but by creating your own. In Experience, Emerson writes:
Two human beings are like globes, which can touch only in a point, and, whilst they remain in contact, all other points of each of the spheres are inert; their turn must also come, and the longer a particular union lasts, the more energy of appetency the parts not in union acquire. Life will be imaged, but cannot be divided nor doubled. Any invasion of its unity would be chaos.
But this is false. To experience another person’s mind (whether through a brilliant book or an everyday interaction) is not just to pick out one idea that you think defines the other. It is to begin exploring his or her web of thinking while sharing your own. You both have unique webs, but each element of your thought is shared with many other people. You gain the most by exploring many of the other person’s moral nodes and their connections. This does not threaten your “unity” or risk chaos, because your own character was already a heterogeneous, evolving, and loosely connected web that you largely adopted from other people. Touching at just one point is a failure of communication and interpretation.
To be sure, you can strive to disentangle from everyday life and politics and prefer books to “dining out occasionally” (which, Thoreau found, interfered with his “domestic arrangements”), but you should not persuade yourself that you have thereby disconnected your network map from everyone else’s. Your self is still a social creation, and you are still mentally involved with others, even if you detach politically and economically.
References: Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, (New York: Random House, 2009) pp. 134-5, 138. Emerson, “Experience,” in ibid, p. 322. Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods (New York: T.Y Crowell & Co., 1899)p. 62
The post Emerson’s mistake appeared first on Peter Levine.
We were quite impressed with the updated version of an innovative tool that our friends at the OpenGov Foundation have been working on that is called BaltimoreCode.org. The website is designed to make the laws that govern Baltimore not only open and transparent, but open for comment, criticism, or input from everyday citizens.
Today, BaltimoreCode.org doesn’t just give you a Google-level law search engine. It doesn’t just give you a modern, user-friendly experience. Now, you can speak out and comment directly on the laws of Baltimore City.
That’s right. When you discover a law that isn’t working well for Baltimoreans, or that is a massive headache for you, you can quickly and easily identify it right there on the same page.
With municipal, state, and federal laws and their interactions being more complex than ever, this nifty tool could provide a great jumping off point for broader accountability, transparency, and participation in our laws.
You can read the original post about the new update on OpenGov Foundation’s blog here, or go straight to the www.BaltimoreCode.org to find out more.
We wanted to share a post from our friends at Public Agenda on the usefulness of their Choicework approach for teaching and engaging students in discussion about public policy, even when they are jaded on politics. You can read more about the approach below or find the original post here.
Life on campus this fall will be very different from last year, when a forthcoming election enlivened debate from the dining hall to the lecture hall. But in an off year for national politics, how can you build your students’ interest in critical public issues?
Engaging students on public issues is not an easy task, and no wonder. It’s hard for most to connect with theoretical policy, especially when they see their political system as inept, broken, or otherwise unworthy of trust. For students enmeshed in social lives, academics, a job and, often, family responsibilities, talking about policy can seem even more hopeless. While many students may simply consider such matters as wholly theoretical abstractions far removed from the reality of their daily lives, we know they are not. Policy has the ability to change the answer to questions like: Will I have a job in my field when I graduate? Has technology forever changed the landscape of employment? What does the Affordable Care Act mean for me when I turn 26?
We’ve found that there are ways to make policy decisions come alive for students (as well as other members of the public). Together with the Kettering Foundation, Public Agenda developed the Choicework approach. Rooted in the theories of our co-founder, Dan Yankelovich, Choicework can be truly transformative for a few reasons. In the same way that storytelling can bring a news article, research or cause to life, Choicework roots policy approaches in finite and human choices, using accessible language and grounding the choices in essential values that people really connect with.
Choicework can make policy come to life. The point is not to choose one and only one approach; rather, by emphasizing the inherent choices and stakes in the issue at hand brings policy to life, Choicework helps students connect to it and envision how policy plays out in their own lives and the lives of others, and visualize other approaches and broaden the discussion.
In addition to Immigration, Public Agenda has published Citizen Solutions Guides on Jobs & The Economy, Healthcare, Education, The Federal Budget, and Energy. All of our CSG’s include introductory overviews of the topic, key facts, links to online supporting documentation, and illustrative charts and graphs.
Interested in experimenting with this approach in your classroom? Our nonpartisan Citizens’ Solutions Guides on some of our nation’s most hotly contested issues make great discussion starters in the lecture hall and are free to download. We’d love to hear your stories putting Choicework to use. Let us know how it works out!
Bill Shore and Darrell Hammond are fabulously successful social entrepreneurs. Each founded a nonprofit that raised tons of money, inspired many thousands of volunteers, drew great press, and provided lots of services. (Share Our Strength fed homeless people; KaBOOM! built playgrounds.) Now, along with Amy Celep, these two founders have written a provocative piece entitled “When Good is Not Good Enough.” This passage –contributed by Shore–gives a flavor of the whole article:
So I began with an idea that was clear, simple, and wrong: we would end hunger by raising money and granting it out to food banks and other emergency food assistance programs. It should have been obvious then, as it is now, that hunger is a symptom of the deeper, more complex problem of poverty.
Both Share Our Strength and KaBOOM! have shifted to addressing what they see as the root causes of big social problems, using tactics inspired by the movements against smoking, drunk driving, and malaria.
In a reply also published by the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Cynthia Gibson, Katya Smyth, Gail Nayowith, & Jonathan Zaff anticipate most of the points I would want to make. They applaud the honesty and ambition of the original article but raise doubts about whether nonprofit organizations can really “solve” social problems without the rest of the public. The two articles together offer a great guide to the debate between social entrepreneurship and civic engagement.
I would add a couple of points that are generally consistent with Gibson, Smyth, Nayowith and Zaff.
First, the metaphor of “root causes” is problematic and misleading. It suggests that if you could fix the root, you could solve a whole problem in one stroke, much as pulling out the root of a weed will kill it. Much more typically, problems form complex systems with no primary cause. For example, racism, crime, violence, education, and poverty all influence each other. Poverty worsens crime, but crime independently deepens the poverty of afflicted communities. Such complexity should not cause despair. You can intervene helpfully at many points in the cycle, not only at the “deepest” point, which may be the least accessible. For instance, better policing does not directly address poverty, but it can cut crime, and that helps poor people.
The metaphor of a root misleadingly suggests that you should only work on the part of the problem that seems somehow biggest and most difficult. That is doubly wrong: (1) you might be able to do more good with limited resources if you intervened somewhere else, and (2) even if you solved the problem that you see as primary, the rest of the system would remain.
Second, the idea that organizations can solve social problems ignores the persistence of politics. In We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For (starting on pp. 65), I mention the popular “moon-ghetto” metaphor from the 1960s:
This was the idea that engineers and other specialists had put human beings on the moon (and brought them safely home), so it should be possible to tackle the problems of the so-called “ghetto” in much the same way. It was all a matter of scientifically diagnosing the causes of poverty and efficiently deploying solutions.
Actually, the moon and the “ghetto” are very different. The moon is almost perfectly detached from all other human issues and contexts, because it is 240,000 miles away from our planet (although NASA’s launch facilities in Florida and Houston might have some local impact). The goal of the Apollo Program—whether you endorsed it or not—was clear and easily defined. The challenges were physical; thus Newtonian physics allowed engineers to predict the impact of their tools precisely in advance. The costs were also calculable—in fact, the Apollo Program was completed under budget. The astronauts and other participants were highly motivated volunteers, who had signed up for a fully developed concept that they understood in advance. The president and other national leaders had committed enough funds to make the Apollo Program a success, because its value to them exceeded the costs.
In contrast, a low-income urban neighborhood is enmeshed with other communities. Its challenges are multi-dimensional. Its strengths and weaknesses are open to debate. Defining success is a matter of values; even how to measure the basic facts is controversial. (For example, how should “race” be defined in a survey? What are the borders of a neighborhood?) Everyone involved—from the smallest child on the block to the most powerful official downtown—has distinct interests and motivations. Outsiders may not care enough to provide adequate funds, and residents may prefer to leave than to make their area better. When social scientists and policymakers implement rewards or punishments to affect people’s behavior, the targets tend to realize what is happening and develop strategies to resist, subvert, or profit from the policies—a response that machines can never offer. No wonder we could put a man on the moon but our poor urban neighborhoods persist. …
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Hello Civic Fizzers!
I didn’t really think this day would actually come. When the sign-up list went around, I was one of the last people to sign up, and September 2013 seemed like a lifetime away.
Well, perhaps, it was a lifetime away. Since we gathered last Summer, I had the good fortune to live in Tirana, Albania for nearly a year – and what a year it was! The bookend events of that year for me were the 100th anniversary of Albanian Independence celebrated in November 2012 and the Presidential Elections held in June 2013.
In between those two events, I engaged in what was the most meaningful and significant work I have ever done. Civic education work – civic education work informed by our time together at Tufts.
Working with the U.S. Embassy in Tirana, I developed and delivered over forty hours of training on effective policy debate to up and coming political leaders for the five largest parties in Albania (side note: over 66 political parties operate in Albania, a country the size of Maryland with a population of about 3 million). This training culminated with three nationally televised debates, the last of which was live!
Given that the majority of political discourse in Albania at the time we started this work was vituperative and consisted mainly of ad hominem arguments, I was terrified that once the cameras started rolling the debaters would revert to this type of discourse, particularly after I found out they had been getting “advice” from their party leaders. But they didn’t. They didn’t engage in name-calling or eye rolling or walking off the stage. They were professional, poised, and pleasant to each other. In short, they participated in civil and rational debate, they shook hands at the end of each debate, and they joined each other for coffee and cocktails when the cameras stopped rolling.
But they never gave up the positions of their parties. Nobody completely capitulated to the arguments of others, but nobody engaged in long-winded diatribes, either. It is worth saying again: they engaged in civil, rational debate. The key word here is debate. Not dialogue. Not conversation. Not deliberation. Debate.
Why did this potentially pivotal moment in Albanian political discourse happen? Well, I’d like to think it was because I am such a good teacher :), but that’s not it. I think the main reasons why this project went so well were 1) the U.S. Embassy provided a space for critical, rational debate to flourish; 2) we developed a format that restricted the ability to engage in unproductive personal attacks; and 3) we made it clear we did not expect the debaters to agree on policies, but we did expect them to respect others’ right to different opinions.
Where am I going with this? Well, I’m going to Chantal Mouffe and the arguments she makes in The Democratic Paradox. I read this book some time ago and when I read it, I don’t think I quite grasped the significance of Mouffe’s adamant argument that democracy thrives when healthy debate among opposing sides provides true choices for citizens to consider. I was more enamored with the ideas of deliberative democracy – of moving people to consensus. Mouffe argues deliberative practices do not strengthen democracy but rather weaken it (at least that’s how I remember her argument).
Perhaps she’s right. Given my experiences in Albania, I understand the importance of agonistic practices to democracy and, by extension, the need to include the study and practice of debate in a civic education curriculum. I would even argue that the ability to engage in effective policy debates is more important to getting a democracy up and running or getting a democracy back on track than the ability to engage in deliberation or dialogue. Deliberation and dialogue may build relationships, but a good debate is more likely to move citizens to action.
Maybe if our own political leaders could be taught to engage in rational critical debate we could get our own democracy back on track. Or maybe not.
Take care and argue well!
Christy
Here’s a development that could have enormous global implications for the search for a new commons-based economic paradigm. Working with an academic partner, the Government of Ecuador has launched a major strategic research project to “fundamentally re-imagine Ecuador” based on the principles of open networks, peer production and commoning.
I am thrilled to learn that my dear friend Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation and my colleague in the Commons Strategies Group, will be leading the research team for the next ten months. The project seeks to “remake the roots of Ecuador’s economy, setting off a transition into a society of free and open knowledge.” 
The announcement of the project and Bauwens’ appointment was made on Wednesday by the Free/Libre Open Knowledge Society, or FLOK Society, a project at the IAEN national university that has the support of the Ministry of Human Resource and Knowledge in Ecuador. The FLOK Society bills its mission as “designing a world for the commons.”
The research project will focus on many interrelated themes, including open education; open innovation and science; “arts and meaning-making activities”; open design commons; distributed manufacturing; and sustainable agriculture; and open machining. The research will also explore enabling legal and institutional frameworks to support open productive capacities; new sorts of open technical infrastructures and systems for privacy, security, data ownership and digital rights; and ways to mutualize the physical infrastructures of collective life and promote collaborative consumption.
Attendees of the IAP2 national conference being held in Salt Lake City, UT next week will have the opportunity to learn more about the progress of both NCDD 2012 Catalyst Award projects. Project representatives, John Spady (National Dialogue Network) and Tim Bonnemann (Real Dialogues), will be hosting the session “Bridge Building and Other Civic Infrastructures — Status of NCDD Catalyst Award Efforts” on Monday from 1:30pm to 3:00pm. Below is the session summary.
Presenters will describe their independent and collaborative efforts since receiving grants from the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation at the beginning of 2013. Tim Bonnemann will present the “Real Dialogues” project, an experiment in using Google Hangouts to create mass media content for promoting public engagement opportunities to the general public. John Spady will use materials developed for a national audience and lead participants through face to face conversations on the broad topic of “Poverty/Wealth in America.” At the end of the conversations participants will answer the current national survey. If time permits, feedback collected during the session will be analyzed and reported back to the group so they can experience the next phase of the national project: public analysis.
The National Dialogue Network project officially launched this week, sharing news of its program and offering a Conversation Kit for participants. Learn how to get involved here, www.nationaldialoguenetwork.org/get-involved. Tim Bonnemann will be sharing a Real Dialogues status report at the IAP2 event, and we’ll have additional updates on the NCDD news blog soon.
The IAP2 conference is being held next week, from September 22-24 in Salt Lake City at the Radisson Downtown. You can learn more at the event’s website, www.iap2usa.org/conference.